by David Safier
"Character matters." McCain says it over and over. If you read the article in the new Vanity Fair, The Man Who Never Was (read Az Blue Meanie's post here), you'll find a portrait of McCain as a small-minded risk taker who never had much in the character area, ever.
McCain says, No Earmarks!, as a sign of his stellar character. But he's got nothing against throwing in the occasional earmark if it helps a campaign donor. Witness the $14.3 million he threw into the 2003 defense bill which resulted in Pinnacle West/SunCor selling land to the Air Force for 2-4 times its value. Donors connected with Pinnacle gave $224,000 to McCain's campaigns since 1998. They gave $104,100 to his 2008 presidential campaign alone.
And McCain never tires of telling us, he stands up to lobbyists! Except that his 2008 presidential campaign was lousy with lobbyists. And he listens to lobbyists plenty when their salaries are paid by wealthy land owners.
In 2005, McCain was behind a bill creating a land swap of private land for federally owned lands. The owner of the private land lobbied McCain hard for the legislation. According to a 2008 story in the Washington Post, among the lobbyists were old McCain staffers and donor/bundlers.
Initially reluctant to support the swap, the Arizona Republican became a key figure in pushing the deal through Congress after the rancher and his partners hired lobbyists that included McCain's 1992 Senate campaign manager, two of his former Senate staff members (one of whom has returned as his chief of staff), and an Arizona insider who was a major McCain donor and is now bundling campaign checks.
And who was given the contract to build the homes on the land the rancher acquired? SunCor, the same people who benefitted from that 2003 earmark I mentioned earlier.
This was one of those incredibly lopsided trades where the developer gives the government low value land in exchange for prime, federally owned real estate.
A town official opposed to the swap said other Yavapai Ranch land sold nine years ago for about $2,000 per acre, while some of the prime commercial land near a parcel that the developers will get has brought as much as $120,000 per acre.
Even if those figures are exaggerated on both ends, it would still be a case of highway robbery, with McCain supplying the six guns for the wealthy donor/developers who robbed the government.
Another problem with the swap was the environmental value and sensitivity of the federal lands that went to the developers. The legislation McCain created bypassed the process of citizen environmental review.
As McCain positions himself as a champion of environmental causes, observers of the Yavapai Ranch swap say it shows a paradox in the senator's positions. At times, he has fought to protect the delicate desert ecosystem. But when wildlife concerns have thwarted development, his loyalties have shifted.
"When the public trust intersects with private interests, basically, he has favored land development . . . in every case," said Rob Smith, director of the Sierra Club's Arizona affiliate.
A newspaper -- like, oh, say, the Star -- which is interested in covering another Senate candidate's scattered use of a few sentences from another source in a dissertation instead of paraphrasing them, might also be interested in actual deals McCain made that involved earmarks, lobbying and huge profits for his wealthy friends and campaign contributers at the government's expense.
The stories of this land swap and of the $14.3 million earmark have never been covered in the Star. One is from 2003, a year before McCain's recent term as Senator. The other occurred during this term, 2005. They're both recent and very relevant history. Voters who deserve to know about a few sentences in a dissertation also deserve to know about these deals -- and a few others which I'll mention in future posts. (Hint: Don Diamond features prominently in one of them.)
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